Lviv Ecotour can help with your genealogical research by taking pictures of your ancestors’ family homes, general pictures of the town, cemetery tombstones, etc. We can assist with your genealogical research by researching documents within the archives of Lviv, or by helping with your family history research when you visit Ukraine.

For individuals with roots in Austrian eastern Galicia prior to 1918, and south-eastern Poland before 1939, vital records may be at the historical archives of Lviv, Ternopil, or Ivano-Frankivsk. More recent vital records are typically kept at state civil registry offices. Many online resources for genealogical research are available on the Internet. Websites such as JewishGen.org and Ancestry.com may have useful information to help in your research.

After the partition of Poland and the forced expulsion of Polish farmers, most of their settlements were transformed into state farms. Polish buildings were taken apart for construction materials to build state farms. Sometimes, the Soviet authorities assigned residential farm buildings to house other people from the area, often Ukrainians expelled from the Polish territory. A few of such houses have survived and can be recognized among other buildings by their distinct style. Some of the original tin roofs have also survived. Polish churches and chapels in the Kresy area have mostly survived, although some were badly damaged after decades of being closed or used for storage. Some of these churches have been restored in the last two decades and are used either by Ukrainian congregations or few remaining members of the Roman Catholic community. In most cases, however, you will now see open fields where the Polish settlements used to be.

Often we have been let into buildings and apartments without their present owners’ concern for legal action in order to return property to its original owners. Local people have been most welcoming and unaware of the ownership issue. In reality, there does not seem to be a legal mechanism in Ukraine to reclaim property lost during the war. Ukrainian laws on reclaiming lost property are complicated, making it extremely difficult to return property to its original owners. For comparison, in Poland, where the legal system is part of the European Law, legal issues surrounding old property claims have never been completely resolved.

It is possible that you will find your family in Ukraine who were separated through emigration decades ago. The chances of meeting the family are rather high if your ancestors are of Ukrainian descent and came from a village or small town in Ukraine. For people of Polish or Jewish background, or for a person of Ukrainian ethnicity from a larger town, such as Lviv, the likelihood of finding a family in Ukraine is quite small. It can be a remarkable experience to visit the town where one’s ancestors come from and from where they left decades earlier.

The rate for most of the services that Lviv Ecotour provides varies depending on each individual case. It depends on the number of hours needed for the research, and a distance to an ancestral town, if a visit is required. Payment can be sent by PayPal or by other means once an agreement has been reached about the services to be delivered and the payment schedule.